Search

Karagöz shadow plays, which has acquired a place in the social life of Turkish society for long years, is an essential instrument which entertains people by making them think and contributes to the formation of social conscious. With the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in 1571, the people who came to the island from Anatolia brought their own culture to Cyprus. They added different cultural ele-ments arising from the socio-geographical characteristics of Cyprus to these cultural elements they brought and blended them. One of the cultural elements brought to the island from Anatolia was the Karagöz shadow play, and this play has gained unique aspects of the island culture over the years and added local features to its structure. The earliest depictions and bread and circuses that can be reached in the Turkish Cypriot Karagöz tradition today date back to the first quarter of the 1900s. Mehmet Ertuğ, who has a very important place in the mentioned tradition in the island began his plays and production of bread and circuses in 1963 and quitted descriptions and producing bread and circuses in 2005 due to health problems. Since 2015, the Karagöz tradition in Cyprus has been carried on by the artist Izel Seylani. For this reason, descriptions and bread and circuses used as unique to the island in Cypriot Turkish Karagöz shadow plays are examined in three periods in the article, namely "from the first quarter to 1963", "from 1963 to 2005" and from 2015 onwards". In this manner, the contributions that Cypriot Turkish culture made to Karagöz plays in the context of descriptions-bread and circuses are displayed. Some of the depictions and bread and circuses dis-cussed in the study belong to Karagözcü Mehmet Salih Efendi, and these depictions and bread and circuses have been used in the games played on the island since the first quarter of the 1900s. The depictions in question were found by Ertuğ, named after a detailed field research and repaired. In addition to using characters such as Bekri, Jew, and Çelebi in his plays, Mehmet Ertuğ added local features to the art of Karagöz by using characters such as the Turkish Cypriot epic teller, public storyteller and minstrel Aynalı, who lived on the island, and the Greek Avrayimi, who displayed films in the Nicosia Çağlayan Cinema; he also included structures unique to the island. Seylani, who continued this art in Northern Cyprus after Ertuğ stopped performing Karagöz, also prefers to use mainly local types and some island-specific elements as bread and circuses in his plays. Seylani uses these local types and places in Cyprus in his plays more intensely than Mehmet Ertuğ. The depic-tions and bread and circuses discussed in the study have survived to the present day thanks to Kara-gözcü Mehmet Efendi, Mehmet Ertuğ and, today, İzel Seylani. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]